Science – Page 18 – A Piece, of the Sky

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Today, with the exponential rise of technology, we no longer live in an agricultural, industrial, manufacturing or even service economy anymore. We live in an information economy. Simply put, there are fewer jobs. Technology has reduced the global number of jobs needed or available. Hence, crises where jobs do not match the number of young people in abundance – like the Great Recession and the Arab Spring. A young population meets a job shortage.

It is better to have a kid’s entire college fund paid for, instead of hoping a kid will become rich and take care of the prior generation. We act like an aging population is a problem, when the flip side, a young population, is a far more unstable situation. As more and more people move from pre-modern, to modern to post-modern societies, they will realize that there are fewer jobs and that the price of having a child is higher than it was in the past. People will be incentivized to work longer in the jobs they do have, and have fewer kids, later, when they are better financially equipped to take care of them. This is a global phenomenon.

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iceland ice waterfall

Iceland was created by volcanoes. It is in between the tectonic plates of two continents, like Hawaii in the Pacific’s Ring of Fire. There is ice stretched over a cauldron, a caldera. The ice is a thin layer over boiling water, that floods when the volcano erupts. Iceland’s recent volcanic eruption in the 2000s may have influenced world weather – a warm 2012, a cold 2013 – with volcanic ash, much like Krakatoa in 1883, and the Year Without Summer, in 1816.

Other Iceland volcanoes lie not under a field of ice – a glacier accessible only by helicopter – but a field of ash. The volcano empties its magma chamber and the earth deflates, contracts and cracks. The area remains barren rock, desolate wasteland, until the chamber fills up again and explodes in an eruption of lava flow.

Iceland, a volcanic hotspot in the far north, is a dynamic meeting of fire and ice, two extremes.

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